The Wild Life Of Expats

Sunshine, sex and stacks of cash… no wonder so many women are choosing to live abroad. But is it all pool parties and promiscuity? Cosmopolitan investigates

As soon as she saw them, almost winking at her from the shop window, she knew they’d be hers. She’d just received her first proper paycheque – £1,500 –tax-free. That was to cover the rent on her huge villa (complete with pool), and leave change for the £400 pair of Louboutin shoes she’d just purchased, on a whim. Designer bag swinging from her arm, she almost skipped, beaming, back into the bustle of The Dubai Mall. Just another cashrich expat, in a sea of shoppers.

The thing is, Lauren Carver* wasn’t cash-rich at all. She was a 22-year-old creative-writing graduate a month into a new job, writing for a magazine in Dubai. Like most of her peers, she couldn’t get a paid job back home in London. But instead of slogging it out at unpaid internships, working a bar job in the evenings and on weekends to pay the rent, she found somewhere she could get a ‘foot in the door’. The fact she was being paid a whole lot more than her mates back home to work somewhere the sun always shined? Well, that was just a bonus.

Of course, the minute she arrived in what locals call ‘The Sandpit’, UK life became a distant memory. Gone were the rainy commutes and thankless job interviews. Weekends spent bingeing on box-sets and boozing at old-man pubs were replaced by all-day brunches at five-star hotels, shopping in designer malls and partying until sunrise. “I kind of lost my head the first month I lived there,” the now33-year-old says. “I spent my entire salary as soon as I got it. I’d just graduated and it felt ridiculous, but it sucks you in, the glamour of it.”

A world of opportunity